Gwen Bergner

Curriculum Vitae

My research and teaching focus on the intersections of race and gender in American and transnational contexts. I teach courses in African American, Women’s, Caribbean, Multiethnic, and Postcolonial literatures and cultural studies; film studies; and critical race theory.  I’ve led three groups of students on global service-learning courses to Jamaica and Trinidad and have presented research on how to make such courses more accessible for underrepresented students. I aim to help students discover how they can contribute to their communities and national conversations on race, gender, sex, human rights, and social justice.

My most recent essay considers Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodrama,  Imitation of Life (1956), in relation to nineteenth-century traditions of racial melodrama to trace how US labor practices worked with discursive systems such as the movies to make the "black maid" ubiquitous and the modifier unnecessary. In other words, the film, like mid-century culture, reduces black women to the function of maid. However, I argue, the black women characters appropriate the film's melodramatic sentimentality and invert the film noir style and femme fatale stereotype--previously unrecognized aspects of the film that are used to neutralize the radical potential of the racial passing plot--to assert personhood apart from their prescribed identities as maids.

A review of two recent books on post-blackness and contemporary representations of slavery is forthcoming in  African American Review.

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